RAO UES head concerned about housing sector

At the end of last week a national meeting of energy workers took place in Krasnoyarsk. The official agenda of the meeting was the results of the 2002-2003 heating season. However, this topic was discussed very little. Participants of the meeting spoke mainly about the coming restructuring of the electrical energy sector. Moreover, RAO UES chief Anatoly Chubais declared he was going to start bringing order to Russia's housing sector, the Izvestia newspaper reported. According to Chubais, the housing sector is currently completely bankrupt. The sector's accounts payable exceeded accounts receivable by 100bn rubles ($3.2bn). The sector's employees do not received salaries for 3-4 months; their qualifications are very low. At the same time the housing sector consumes about one third of energy produced by RAO UES and the sector's share in the total amount of accounts receivable of regional energy companies is about two thirds. This situation cannot be tolerated further, Chubais believes. The company Russian Communal Systems, which is being created by him and some other businessmen, will not be in charge of restructuring the housing sector. This is the task of state authorities, he noted. "We should bring everything into an elementary order there. And our team (in a broad meaning of this word) is able to manage this task", Chubais declared.